The modern automotive service bay contains numerous expensive pieces of equipment designed to automate servicing of an automobile. Wheel aligners, wheel balancers, engine analyzers, brake testers, hydraulic lifts, and similar devices typically contain microprocessors and/or computers to assist an automotive mechanic in performing various servicing tasks. Exemplary computerized automotive wheel alignment systems are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,383,370 and 5,208,646, whose teachings and disclosures are incorporated herein by reference.
Historically, such computerized automotive service equipment comprised proprietary, closed computer systems. A manufacturer of such systems would typically spend years developing software. The manufacturer had to customize the software to run on a single dedicated computer, and the resulting product had little or no flexibility to interchange and update different hardware and software elements. Each system ran different software, often on completely different operating systems designed for completely different hardware platforms. Each individual system also was incapable of being conveniently or easily updated. If a new development or improvement occurred, the manufacturer of the individual system typically had to issue an entirely new version release of the software and/or hardware in order to bring that improvement to market. The new release required a complete rewrite. Not only did new versions often take years to complete. It was also so costly to release a new system that, as a practical matter, the manufacturer would have to wait until enough improvements occurred in order to justify the financial burdens of a new version release. This hampered the ability of the end user, the automotive service professional, to bring the latest technological improvements to the customer, the typical car driver.
Furthermore, such prior art automotive service equipment systems were not generally designed to communicate or cooperate with other computers in the service bay and elsewhere. For instance, the wheel aligner computer did not communicate with the engine analyzer computer, and neither communicated with the accounting computer or the intake/reception area computer. One consequence of this is that customer or vehicle owner/identification information had to be entered repeatedly into each piece of automotive service equipment each time the same vehicle was serviced in different parts of the service bay. This redundancy wasted valuable operator time and promoted key-entry errors.
It has been known to design automotive service equipment that sends data through a local area network to a file server, such as a Novell server platform. This, however, limits the information to being stored as files and does not support real-time data flow or a distributed application. An example of such as system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,404,639, dated Sep. 13, 1983. The data retained in such files could only be downloaded and stored on self-contained proprietary platforms. These data-only files, then, did not give the resulting automotive service equipment system the capability of exporting data to a remote location for processing, and then returning the processed data to the original location. They also did not give the resulting system the capability to locate different portions of a single automotive service equipment application on different computers.
The prior art automotive service equipment system computers also did not communicate with any remote off-site computer to submit in real-time the data gathered by the sensors in the course of effecting a service procedure. Hence, it was not possible for sensors to transmit their data in real-time to a remote site for analysis and inspection at that remote site. For instance, in vehicle wheel alignment applications, the wheel alignment sensors that were mounted on the vehicle wheels were capable of transmitting wheel angle data only to the vehicle wheel alignment machine itself. There was no way for an off-site technician and/or an off-site computer to review the data to evaluate whether the alignment angles were within specification. Likewise, there was no way for an on-site technician to present this real-time angle information to an off-site expert for purposes of either troubleshooting problems with the servicing equipment, or for receiving instructions and advice on how to proceed with an alignment procedure.
Moreover, for automotive service equipment that depended on OEM and manufacturer generated specifications, such as vehicle wheel alignment equipment, the danger of obsolescence presented itself every new model year. Isolated, dedicated systems required continual updating of vehicle specifications, usually via CD-ROM's. Managers of the service bay would have to maintain the most updated specifications available for their computerized automotive service equipment. Otherwise, the service bay might have to turn customers away, or worse, the attendants might service newer vehicles to erroneous specifications. The administrative task of maintaining updated specifications for the computerized equipment was an additional burden on the personnel running the service centers.